Maria crosses the street, where the cars are parked under their bonnets of snow, and only the swerving tracks of tires have left their ribbed marks. She’s a little early, but in a couple of minutes the one o’clock gun from the castle will sound across the city, and wherever he is, still in his lab feeding his mice before shutting them up for the day, or hanging up his lab coat, reaching for his thick tweed overcoat, he’ll hear it and think, she’ll be there, she’ll be waiting. Buccleuch Street, Edinburgh, Scotland. A Friday in December. Friday afternoon. She’s been longing for it all week. She peers in through the glass door, and pushes against it so that a bell rings her arrival like in an oldfashioned grocery shop, and she comes in with clumps of wet snow on her boots to melt on the doormat, and a sense of having reached the next, important stage of the day. She breathes out, a long sigh that nobody should hear. At first glance it looks as if there ’s nobody in the shop, but she feels rather than hears a slight flurry out of sight and then sees the bookseller at the back, bent over and sorting books. There are boxes stacked, and the woman is unpacking them to put out on the shelves. She comes out, straightening herself, pushing back a strand of her hair. She has the slightly anxious look of a shy person who’s afraid that what she says and does may not be appropriate. She also shows for an instant that she knows Maria, but she hides this knowledge, personal, even embarrassing, behind her professional manners. Maria is wearing the long dark blue coat she usually wears, still flecked with snow. Snow melts on her hair and her gloved hands— she’s kept her gloves on, so that her skimming of pages where she stands, at a shelf of books that have been laid face up for easy examination, looks more like passing the time than any real curiosity. She looks up from the book she isn’t reading, a collection of Maupassant stories, and smiles. “Hi.” She knows that the woman knows she’s waiting. “Good morning.” “Sorry if I startled you.” “Oh, no, that’s fine. Just, I didn’t really think anyone would come in today. Who would have thought it, more snow.” “Mmm, it was forecast, though.” Maria keeps her conversation to a polite but distracted murmur to indicate that she has come in here to find something she has not yet quite thought of. Bookshops are places where you can take your mind offwaiting. Her hands hold the book as if it were a passport, one gloved finger dividing pages. She says vaguely, “I wonder if you have any George Sand?” The bookshop is a small independent one tucked away in an alley at the back of Buccleuch Place, not the larger, brighter, newly chained university bookshop where students mostly go to order the books they are going to be made to read. It specializes in French literature and books in translation. You can get yesterday’s Le Monde here, and even Libération. Maria sometimes wonders how it can keep going, but then there are all the guidebooks too, and books about how to buy houses in France, how to cook like a French person, how to stay thin, and Peter Mayle. “Oh, yes.” The woman seems relieved to be asked about an actual book. “There ’s a course, isn’t there, the French Romantics. I have some of the novels in stock, and the letters to Musset. That’s all for now. But you know the big new letters to Flaubert will be out soon? It’s being translated, I believe. Are you teaching Sand?” “No, but I’m reading her. I’m thinking of writing about her. I’d like to order the Flaubert letters, but I want them in the original.” “Right, well, I can do that.” The woman goes offto look on the computer behind her desk, runs her eye up and down the screen, her hand competent on the mouse. She has grey- brown hair, most of it scraped back, and a profile that belongs on a Greek coin, Maria thinks, very pure and classical. She knows from the woman’s glance at her that she knows. There’s an odd tension between them, as if both are wondering together, will he come? Maria stands there, snow turning to damp stains on her coat and in her dark hair. The bookseller is placing her order. “Excuse me, your name? I know you, of course, you’ve been in here before, but.” “Maria Jameson. Like the whisky.” Then the door swings open with the clang of the bell again and he comes in, cold air rushing in with him. On the street, a dark day, white gulls swooping white between the granite buildings, falling and rising in the gusts of snow. His coat flies open, he ’s blazing, in spite of the cold, and the red scarf at his neck flies out like a flag. His glance goes straight to Maria— who still stands with the unread book in her hands, any book will do, as a passport, an alibi, she ’s put down the Maupassant, picked up something on Derrida— and then quickly scans the bookshelves, the carpets, the woman bending as if to hide herself behind the computer. Then he looks at Maria again. The challenge of him: I’m here. She drops the book back into a pile, as he puts out a hand to touch her arm, meaning, let’s go. She ’s moving towards him as if pulled by magnets, in spite of books and furniture, as if no mere object can stand in her way. The bookseller says mildly, “There, that’s done, you should have it in a week at the latest. Can you leave me a phone number? Or I can send you an e- mail?” Maria scribbles her address, e- mail and phone number, no longer thinking about Flaubert’s letters to George Sand and hers to him; those will have to wait. The bookseller retreats to her stack of cardboard boxes, to count books. She almost scuttles. Maria pays no more attention to her except to say a cursory, “Goodbye, thanks so much,” because he is here, tall and eager and thin, with snow on his curly dark hair and his cold bare hands. She ’s flowing towards him, they have this brief time in the middle of the day, and it’s all they have, the clock has begun to tick already. The woman in the bookshop is neither here nor there; she was an intermediary, a necessary stage on the way; later Maria will come back here alone and check on the other books she needs to order, but now she is going ahead of him out of the shop, into the street, into the blowing snow, between the iron- grey of walls and in the flurry of flakes flying sideways blown by the wind, forging her necessary way. The streets and sidewalks are icy beneath the latest fall of snow. But they stride together as if the day were warm, the air benign, the ground sure beneath their feet; they walk close, she looking up at him, laughing, he bending close to say something into her ear. They pass before the glass windows of the bookshop’s front and are gone. —— She opens the front door with her own key and they both go in, she leading the way. She picks up damp mail from the inside mat, places it on the hall table; even now she has the impulse to tidy things, even with him coming in close behind her like a tall shadow in his dark coat, even with the burning feeling she already has inside. The house is silent, with the dense silence of having been empty of its occupants for several hours. She feels it instantly, its moods and atmospheres. There’s clutter in the hall, boots kicked off— Emily’s old ones— too many coats hung on the back of the door, a sports bag nobody has claimed. There’s still a faint smell of breakfast, old toast and coffee. The cat comes running, wiping herself around their legs. Edward left early this morning to go to the Department, and the children are at school till late afternoon, after which both of them are going to friends’ houses for tea. Edward has a meeting and will then play squash, then bridge, with his friend Martin. She turns to smile back at the man coming in after her, yes, come in, it’s safe, it’s fine. They collide in the hall as she turns to shut the door, he holds her arm, it’s all right, relax, we are here. The house is their space for now, and they have time. It’s Friday, their best day, their longest, freest, the day to which all others bear no comparison. Friday, and she will soon have everything she wants, it will all begin to happen again. They have driven here in her car, so that his can stay visible in the university car park, and hers, her five- yearold Renault, parked outside her own house, will not arouse any suspicion. Before he followed her into her house, he had to give a quick glance up and down the street, to be sure. Edinburgh may be a capital city, but it’s still a small town, and people know him; he’s been here for long enough and been involved in things for long enough— the church, the university, parents’ groups, football matches, he’s for Celtic and goes most Saturdays— for people to notice and remember him. He ’s also an unusually tall man, noticeable wherever he is. He comes into Maria’s house cautiously, it’s on a side of town and a street where he doesn’t feel immediately at ease; something to do with class, with its associations, the New Town as opposed to the Old, nineteenth- century pretensions that still hang on in the size of the houses, the size of the rooms. He doesn’t leave his coat in the hall— with its mosaic stone floor and the high ceiling of Victorian bourgeois Edinburgh houses, terraced houses yet too tall, overbearing he thinks, houses built with little notion of comfort but plenty of assumptions about superiority— but shrugs out of it as he goes, and carries it into the spare bedroom; there will be no outward signs, somebody coming in unexpectedly will not have the chance to wonder, whose coat is that? He hangs it on the back of the door in the bedroom, on top of a limp dressing gown that already hangs there. There ’s a high double bed made up for guests, the cover pulled tight. She bends to turn up the heating. She switches on a light beside the bed, for the day is dark. She pulls the tall wooden shutters half shut, to exclude what light there is and give privacy— from what, the garden, the pale sky? The outside world. Something ticks in the house: the fridge, the electricity. Something else hums. She lives in a house full of electric gadgets which have their own lives, their own schedules, ticking and whirring when there is no one home, more permanent, she sometimes thinks, than any of the inhabitants. On the bedside table there ’s a large digital clock Edward bought, which gleams green and flashes numbers at her, and she turns its face to the wall. She wants neither time nor machinery to intrude. Sean sits down on the bed at last and begins to pull offhis shoes, large rather grubby trainers like the ones her son wears, which remind her of the age difference between them. He pulls his sweater offover his head, followed by his shirt and the off- white T- shirt that in summer he wears on its own. She, meanwhile, pulls offher boots— black, which she wears with her good black trousers, their uppers now stained with snow— and begins unbuttoning her own shirt. They do not undress each other, and she rather regrets this, as it always has erotic potential for her. Their undressing is almost businesslike in its swiftness and self- absorption, it’s about getting naked rather than the performance of turning each other on. She watches him, though, as he unbuckles his leather belt and unzips his sagging jeans, which slide over his skinny hips, and reveal a white, flat stomach below a very faint tan line left from summer, and the beginnings of a pathway of black hair. He glances at her, grins. She ’s undoing her bra— and she wants him watching now, and he does, as her breasts fall forwards and the bra drops to the floor— a new bra, but white, not the black she prefers, as she has picked up that he likes a virginal look, or at least a practical one, in underwear. He sees her, and she sees him, just enough now, as his underpants slide off, and so do the rather prim white knickers she has on today, and both are kicked to one side; and then they are together, touching all the way down the length of their naked bodies, that first contact she loves, cool flesh warming fast, nipples rising to the chill air in the room— why does central heating never really warm these tall rooms?—and the weight of his cock rising against her, its thickening and lengthening as she holds it against her stomach. Such an extraordinary thing, that root of a man’s cock under your fingers, the way it grows dense and solid; when she moves away, its tip is already gleaming. They fall to the bed, and hold each other again, but differently this time, because there’s only one thing each of them wants, and that is to be inside and outside each other respectively, and for the miracle to begin again. He is tall, taller than Edward, and his long pale legs go all the way to the end of the bed, and he pushes her head up against the wall as he rocks her, so she wants to push down, and her hand is on his buttocks, she pushes herself down to meet him so that their pubic bones meet, and she thinks of two flints rubbing together to make sparks, because they are both bony and it isn’t entirely comfortable; and then he licks all around one of her nipples and begins to suck, pulling the reddened nipple up into a point, playing with it, sucking some more; she can’t wait, it all begins to unfurl and open up, it, she, whatever she is, this body, this flesh, and as she begins to come, he follows, and there has never been anything quite like it, for her, anyway, and she is turning herself inside out, shedding skin, unravelling is how she feels it, becoming nothing, and then again, starting again, the mounting, mounting, and the long descent into what feels like annihilation, that makes her scream, only he has a hand on her mouth, shh, shh, darling; and the way he carries her then, where to, away, somewhere else, somewhere with no return, is what makes it impossible to be anywhere but here, now, and know that she is alive. Darling, darling, the way he says it, the Irish softness of his voice, and yet she hardly knows him, not in the ordinary way you know people; she knows him completely, in this other way, the one nobody talks about, where you do this and you are together and love is in what you are, on the surfaces, in the depths. They rest, lying against each other, laughing with surprise, the way they always laugh with surprise, because it’s astonishing, isn’t it, the way this happens, the way they are together, this ease. She’ll never be able to give him up, because he shows her herself, the self she ’s never seen, because he opens her up to herself so that she ’ll never be the same. And he? He loves this, and fears it. She doesn’t see what he fears, and if she does, if she sees it sometimes in the too- quick way he glances at himself in the mirror afterwards, the thoughtless hurry with which he ties his shoes, one foot raised on to the side table beside the bed, then the other, laces knotted and tugged tight, she doesn’t register it, because there ’s nothing to be afraid of now, is there, life has opened itself up completely and shown itself, there are no corners, nothing left over, excluded, nothing to dread. Dread belongs to the future, and together they have wiped out the future, they have established themselves together, here, now, forever in this present. Of course, the hours pass as if clocks are being wound faster and faster, and it’s soon time for him to look at his watch, which he has taken offand laid beside hers on the bed table; and outside the light has nearly gone, and if they stay any longer they will be in danger of losing everything. Beneath them the sheet is sticky and cooling, and she feels herself soaked between the legs, and they get up to wash each other in the second bathroom, where there is a big old tub with huge taps, left from the last century, in which they can both fit while the rush of hot water heats the cold white depth of it, and there ’s nothing of hers and Edward’s, just some old bath salts and soaps that her mother left here last time she came to stay, and an old sponge— whose?—to squeeze water over each other’s shoulders and heads, in the steam that rises. They wash each other, serious and careful, cherishing flesh. The kindness of skin. The crevices, where tenderness grows. But by now they know the time, so they are slightly brisk too, like kind nannies with children who want to linger, and they are the nannies and their bodies the children, lazy, grumbling, making up another game to make the adults stay. At last, he ’s fastening his shoes, yes, the way he always does, as if he were about to run somewhere, and she’s barefoot on the carpet, her fingers on his face, wanting her touch to remember this, his fatigued eyelids, the scratch of stubble, the wide soft contours of his mouth. Such a beautiful mouth. It will be with her, on her, now forever. She is all gratitude and calmness now, and it isn’t she who will have to shrug on an outdoor coat and go out into the snowy cold of the street, and hail a cab to go back to the university car park; she can stay in her house, musing and amazed as women have been over the centuries, slow and a little forgetful, pottering and tidying and covering the traces of this time, so that her husband and children can come in innocent and unaware, to what is after all their home. When he has gone— a kiss at the door, a running of his fingers across her face, a rumpling of her hair, a touch which remembers, which creates memory— she goes back into the bedroom, strips the bed. She bundles up the sheets and shoves them into the washing machine with some other clothes and their towel, and switches the machine on. She opens the shutters halfway so that the indigo sky shows between dark trees, she tugs back the curtains. She walks around, sniffing, and then sprays air freshener, though she hates the smell. She sprays perfume on herself, a sharp lemony Armani perfume that Edward likes. She goes down to the kitchen in the basement, switches the kettle on, and makes toast, two slices laid in the flat metal toaster on the AGA, so that the house smells warm and inhabited, and she sits on a stool in the kitchen eating a slice covered thickly with butter and honey, with a mug of tea in which a tea bag still leaks. Imagines them coming in— Why am I eating toast? Well, I just felt like some, would you like some too? Did George Sand, she wonders, have to go in for all this subterfuge? How was it possible, in the nineteenth century, to handle all those comings and goings, all those men? There must surely have been a code, a way of going on; the servants, they would have noticed, what did she do about them? Or was it all conducted with such sangfroid, such aplomb— all those words which you could hardly even use in Scotland— that nobody could ever be sure? Chopin, Alfred de Musset, Michel de Bourges, Prosper Mérimée, Jules Sandeau; and the husbands, or near- husbands, Casimir Dudevant, Manceau. Marie Dorval? Not Pauline Viardot, whom she nevertheless adored. With Chopin, Musset and Casimir, she travelled. Mérimée was (she said) her worst mistake. With Sandeau, it was as two writers together, sharing a nom de plume to create a novel, with sex almost an aside. But he once climbed out of her window at dawn— having crept past the dogs and her sleeping husband— a happy, exhausted man. George Sand wanted men— and occasionally women— and she had them. She was someone who knew the secret that Maria is beginning to know. But how, for God’s sake, did it translate into her everyday life, as mother, grandmother, writer, even wife? Of course, it wasn’t just her. Other women, Louise Colet, who was Flaubert’s lover, and had been Musset’s too. The women who had been grand courtesans, and the ones who were grand revolutionaries. It was the time they lived in, it must have been; it was France, post- revolutionary, ration - alist, pragmatic France moving into the era of romanticism, of the sublime, the picturesque; the passions of young Werther in Germany meeting Rousseau’s noble savage, wild landscapes and wild passions being de rigueur. It may not have been easy, thinks Maria in the twenty- first century, but at least it was all possible. Inside her still there beats the rhythm of his blood and hers, the throb and seep of his semen; she is still open, still aware. Her skin feels raw, porous. Edward will come into the house and look for her, and she ’ll be in the kitchen, perfumed, edgy, eating toast and honey at five o’clock in the afternoon. No, better if she were in her study, drinking a glass of wine. Reading George Sand, making notes. What can seem ordinary, now? She has no idea. She has arrived somewhere where she doesn’t know the customs, can’t read the signs, and there is no one, except a dead French writer, to give her a clue. rosalind brackenbury